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20 Responses to "QotD: Firefox"

1. | Reply Jeff
   Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 7:40pm #
   

   Well I think there are two questions here do I use/care about Firefox on my Mac. No, I don't because there are lots of great browsers on teh Mac and Firefox's interface doesn't fit in.

   But of course I give a shit about it. Firefox has the potential to release Microsoft's stranglehold on the browser market. This can only be a good thing for Mac users. If more people on Windows use Firefox then web developers will be forced to code to web standards and not simply cater to IE. This is especially important to Mac users because IE has been discontinued on the Mac and if web developers continue to cater simply to IE it could be bad news for the platform in general.

2. | Reply Pedro Vera
   Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 8:31pm #
   

   I use Firefox as my main browser, but I don't think I qualify as giving a shit about it. The damn thing just works fine for what I need a browser to do, it is not the kind of thing that I lose sleep over.

   The only time I ever fire up Safari is because of a bug in openwebmail when trying to download a mail folder. The other 99.9999% of the time I am usually browsing with Firefox.

   So yes, I use it, but not because I give a shit about it. The only piece of software that gets me fired up and emmotional is BBEdit, now that's something I do give a shit about.

3. | Reply Eric
   Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 8:34pm #
   

   Yeah, I care.. but only because I have to use a PC at work 🙂

4. | Reply Aaron Linville
   Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 8:51pm #
   

   I use Firefox on Windows and Unix machines other than Mac OS X. When I'm on my Mac I prefer a much browser that fits in much better like Safari or Camino. I'll consider using Firefox on my Mac when it gets a little bit better Mac support (should be soon).

   Firefox has a lot of nifty extensions, and the behavior of the browser has some very nice fine grained controls that Safari and Camino just don't provide. I just can't stand using what feels like a Windows application on my Mac. 🙂

5. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 9:01pm #
   

   Well I think there are two questions here

   You are correct. I am glad - and I do give a shit - that it exists for Windows. Otherwise, they'd still all have to use IE. 😛

6. | Reply Dave Breaker
   Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 9:29pm #
   

   This shouldn't be about browser wars or even choice. It should not even be about OS. It is about whether Firefox is a better browser/technology or not and IMHO Firefox is a better browser.

   So on OS X Firefox does not have the brushed metal look. I can live with that. So it has the older Aqua look. I can even live with that - there again so does Mail and Xcode.

   So it uses a uniform interace across all platforms. I like that. Yes it breaks the rules on some OSes (OS X) but from a users point of view I can go to work and use it on Wintel and go home and use it on OS X and everything is where it is meant to be and it works. No relearning or brain rewiring based on where I am sitting or which OS I am sitting in front of. I like being able to do thing habitually. It makes my life easier.

   From my experience Firefox has the following benefits over Safari on OS X (and IE 6 on Wintel):

   much better use of contextual menusI can inspect the certificate of a pageI can easily reload a single frame/page from contextual menusit has a DOM inspector for when you I am coding a pagea javascript consolebetter error reportingbetter bookmark managerbetter download managerbetter search featuresand the list goes on.

   My thoughts on Safari:

   Yes Safari is fast at rendering pages but that is all it has over any other browser.

   My pet hates with Safari which I keep reporting to Apple:

   Why doesn't Safari have Reload page in the contextual menu?Why do I have to go to the tab to get the reload in the contextual menu?How can I see the certificate of a https page?The lock for a https page should not be in the title bar. (It breaks the rules of their human interface guidelines)

   For a company that prides itself on UI they really fell short in Safari.

   Also until Safari has a decent rendering implementation that support javascripts like htmlArea and some of the higher end dynamic html functions I will continue to use FireFox on OS X. At least I do not get so many "sorry your browser is not supported messages". Here is an examle URL. Try it in both Safari and any other modern browser including FireFox on any platform and see the difference.

   htmlArea

   I am not saying Firefox does not have flaws but Safari still has a long way to go and anyone who has not tried Firefox should download it. Once you start using the rich feature set of Firefox you will realise what you have been missing with Safari. long live Firefox - give it a try. If you have not used Firefox 0.8 or higher on OS X, they have taken steps towards making it look like an OS X app. The 1.1 release of FirFox should also have a lot more Aquification to it as well so it will feel even more like a Cocoa app.

7. | Reply Bud Landry
   Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 9:47pm #
   

   Firefox strength lies in being a cross platform solution, and is usually praised by those who are spending hours a day in Linux or Windows.

   What bothers me is when the praise comes from Mac OS X users, great number of which seem totally oblivious to the existance of Camino, which is probably as close to Firefox as anything will come, except written in Cocoa rather than Carbon, and has doesn't get the manhours applied to it as much as Firefox apparently. But I think it is merely a matter of ignorance (not stupidity, ignorance-- they don't realize Camino even exists)

   I use OmniWeb primarily, and Safari secondarily these days. I also still keep Explorer around, which would leave whatever flavor of Mozilla down the list somewhat. I use different browsers for different types of surfing and sometimes, it is the browsing history, and stored cookies, which make one browser a choice over the other. OmniWeb gets picked because of the way it handles tabs, in comparison to Safari, although its saving of a workplace can be a mixed blessing.

8. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 9:51pm #
   

   Safe to say Dave's answer to the question "do you care about it" is "yes."

9. | Reply Clint Ecker
   Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 9:54pm #
   

   So I guess you use Safari or OmniWeb. I really cannot use Safari, and I've never really come away from OmniWeb with anything good to say. However I've addressed my complaints against Safari here.

10. | Reply Dave Breaker
    Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 10:23pm #
    

    Bud, I know Camino exists and I have used it. Just because it is not mentioned does not make anyone ignorant. Maybe the Camino project is just irrelevant in the grander scheme of thing. I think it is splitting the resources that could be applied to a single unified project. Imagine where Firefox would be on OS X today if the efforts of Camino were rolled into the Firefox project. Firefox may even be using Aqua. I really do not see the point in Camino - it is no different than when Microsoft built IE for Windows only. Netscape was leading edge at the time. I can only hope that the Camino project ceases and their efforts are applied to Firefox.

    Clint, it sounds like you have suffered from Safari Fever for too long. I thought that it was just me that started getting ticks and twitches when ever I had to use Safari.

11. | Reply Samual Icky
    Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 11:45pm #
    

    I'll chime in... Yes I care! Kinda. I can't stand Safari at all, so that limits my browser choices off the bat. I'm not going to go into those issues... but I've removed Safari.app from my System.

    I however don't think that the "roadmap" should have been changed for Firefox. Last week they, m.o looked at the versiontracker reviews and thought hay lets shipp the mac version as is... people really seem to like it over safari. Well that was the cover. All the Aquafaction that was planned would strach well into March of `05... and they really want to get everything back to the truck... so what happens roll Aquafacation back to Firefox 1.1 which would ship around the same time as the Mac 1.0 would have. As a result we get the heaping mess that m.o calls Firefox for Mac OS X.

    Oh and I use Firefox for OS X daily... my main browser of choice.

    Oh and Dave you make a horriable jump in logic... Camino isn't spliting resources. M.o has no control over the projects persay... Camino (Camino started out to prove Gecko could prove to be a WebKit like interface before WebKit was a twinkle in Apple's eye) started before firefox so they can't just pretend it never existed and many people love Camino... Not all developers who work on Camino would drop what they are doing and work on the Firefox port. Some might never have worked on an Open Source project and some just might find some other Open Source project work on.

12. | Reply isle.yi.org
    Posted 10 Nov 2004 at 11:57pm #
    

    I guess I would say "yes", because I like having choice. Whether or not I choose to exercise it, is another thing entirely.

    Personally I find Safari's interface disgusting and horribly unintuitive, and way too simple. When I first tried it, I expected clippy to jump out at me and tell me how to click on a link. Of course, you may feel different. The "it doesn't fit in on the mac" common complaint didn't even dawn on me as a possibility until I read it on a web page somewhere. It borderlines on nit-picking.

    I apologize for the callous remarks, but quibbling over UI when in reality, the renderer is what matters is pretty silly. And FireFox 1.0's javascript DOM implementation on the mac is really damn slow.

13. | Reply Ralph Scheuer
    Posted 11 Nov 2004 at 3:51am #
    

    Yes, I do. There are basically three reasons for me to use Firefox: MIDAS (htmlarea), the fantastic Web Developer extension and compatibility testing. I hate shitty XUL interfaces and I couldn't care less about it myself. However, at work I have the privilege of developing on the Mac, and therefore I need Firefox for the above reasons (one of them will be going away soon because Camino will get MIDAS).

    Another reason to care is that I sincerely hope it will take a lot of market share from IE on Windows - it's so incredibly annoying for our web designer to code around all those glitches in IE - maybe Firefox will help us to tell our customers one day "well, our applications are built for modern browsers, you know..." - I don't say it will happen, but hey, one can at least dream 😉

14. | Reply Ralph Scheuer
    Posted 11 Nov 2004 at 3:57am #
    

    Another thing that bugs me about Safari: you cannot build backtracking-safe web apps and rely on its behavior because in general, Safari has a tendency to cash too aggressively (in fact, its entire behavior upon a "return null" in WebObjects is unreliable) and moreover, the Javascript and DHTML support in current incarnations still sucks at times...

15. | Reply thomas@terminaljunkie.com
    Posted 11 Nov 2004 at 4:07am #
    

    I have tried both Safari and Firefox but I find Firefox much better than Safari in terms of features especially "Extension" like Web Developer Toolbar. RSS feed live bookmark is also one of the feature I find it very useful. I hope with the release of Tiger, Safari can catch up with Firefox in terms of cool new features that will enchance our browsing experience.

16. | Reply Ralph Scheuer
    Posted 11 Nov 2004 at 5:18am #
    

    I certainly meant "cache" not "cash" (morning language barrier, I think 😉

17. | Reply Troy Brumley
    Posted 11 Nov 2004 at 8:18am #
    

    Yes, I do. In a word--extensions. If Safari had similar capabilities, I'd use it full time.

18. | Reply Tim Buchheim
    Posted 11 Nov 2004 at 2:34pm #
    

    I only use Firefox on non-Mac platforms.

    On Mac OS X I nearly always use Safari, but I keep a copy of Camino around for pages which don't work for whatever reason in Safari. (This is very rare.)

19. | Reply raoli.com
    Posted 12 Nov 2004 at 1:21am #
    

    Firefox 1.0

    In his Question of Two Days Ago, Erik Barzeski asked if we, the readers, care about Firefox. My answer is Yes. 95%+ of the time I’m browsing the Web, I’m using Safari or some other WebKit-derived browsing interface. However, there...

20. | Reply MacUser
    Posted 03 Dec 2004 at 6:45am #
    

    I also use Safari only on my Mac ,

    but ,

    as said above some pages don't show up well in Safari ,

    so ,

    Camino to the rescue ,

    but it doesn't work always ,

    strangely ,

    Omniweb does while it uses the same engine as Safari

    So OmniWeb to the rescue it is